Jackson Heights Groups Unveil Bottom-Up Plan for Green Neighborhood

Last week, Jackson Heights residents won a summer-long car-free street, and it turns out that local activists have many more initiatives for a greener, more livable neighborhood in their sights.

The Jackson Heights Green Agenda [PDF] — the product of a community planning process that drew on the expertise of hundreds of residents — sets an ambitious, bottom-up roadmap for making New York’s most diverse neighborhood more sustainable.

The goals outlined in the Green Agenda range from increased open space and green buildings to creating a hiring hall for day laborers in the neighborhood. It’s also full of livable streets initiatives. The recommendations include turning streets and parking lots into pedestrian spaces, plazas, and parks. To reduce congestion, the plan calls for adding more Muni-meters to commercial streets and pricing them to increase turnover. To serve a neighborhood where 60 percent of households don’t own a car, it envisions bike lanes on Roosevelt Avenue and better transit service.

The Green Agenda emerged from a year-long planning process led by Queens Community House, a set of community centers in the settlement house tradition; the Jackson Heights Beautification Group, and the Pratt Center for Community Development; along with a few other local organizations. Funding for the plan came from a state environmental justice grant.

The coalition held three half-day workshops, starting last November, each of which drew more than 100 people, where residents discussed the strengths and weaknesses of their neighborhood. "Portable workshops" brought the process to churches, adult education classes, and other groups already meeting. The outreach was multi-lingual, an absolute must in a neighborhood where many residents don’t speak fluent English.

"We’ve all been really happy with the process," said Anna Dioguardi, the director of community organizing and development for Queens Community House. "It was definitely challenging to get the conversation started, especially when in many communities, even the word ‘green’ doesn’t mean the same thing it does in English."

Local activists were encouraged by the extent of participation. Len Maniace, a volunteer with the Jackson Heights Beautification Group, praised the campaign’s ability to fully include Spanish and Bengali-speakers. He feels a palpable change in the neighborhood. Instead of feeling resigned to living with the way the neighborhood looks and feels now, he said, residents now ask, "Why shouldn’t I have a really nice looking neighborhood?"

All that outreach helped to create a plan tailored to the specific needs of Jackson Heights. The top priority for bicycle infrastructure, for instance, is to install more bike racks, said Dioguardi, "because many people don’t have room for bikes in their buildings." Jackson Heights residents, many of whom work the night shift, were also more concerned with improving off-peak transit service than other communities might be, added Dioguardi. "The final product is really much more representative of the entire community" than any top-down plan would have been, she argued.

No single group will be pushing the whole agenda. Rather, neighborhood activists will use the document to guide and coordinate their work. Maniace, for example, mentioned signing Jackson Heights residents up for energy efficiency tax credits and making the 78th Street Play Street permanent as next steps. Dioguardi said that Queens Community House would likely focus on affordable, green buildings. According to Dioguardi, the Green Agenda has also earned praise from every Jackson Heights elected official, which could make it an effective advocacy tool if some recommendations encounter resistance later on.

This is fantastic! When Brooklyn residents and activists similarly created a grass roots plan for Grand Army Plaza it clearly paved the way for NYC DOT to get going on greening Brooklyn’s premier public space. I hope this plan similarly galvanizes city agencies.

Does anyone happen to know whether plans like this become reference documents for City Planning and other relevant agencies? Is there a formal mechanism to feed this as “advice” to the city? How can it become institutionalized?

Excellent question, momos! While we now have leadership at NYCDOT who has been quite responsive to community-led efforts like the Green Agenda for Jackson Heights, there is no institutionalized mechanism to ensure that DOT and other city agencies take this kind of bottom-up planning seriously. Section 197a of the NYC Charter establishes an elaborate process by which communities (in practice, this usually means Community Boards) can conduct participatory planning processes, then get the resulting plans ratified through a pretty elaborate technical and political process – all of which said communities need to do entirely on their own dime. So community-based planning is constrained by uneven access to resources, and by the widely varying capacity and often unrepresentative composition of community boards. If a community manages to jump through all the hoops, the resulting 197a plan is merely advisory, rather than binding on future land use and capital spending by the city. If this sounds like a formula for only the most affluent and best-connected communities to get their voices heard, it is. If you think the process should be more transparent and fair, pay close attention to the very low-key NYC Charter Revision process that is now underway. While most of the airtime at scheduled hearings is devoted to term Limits, non-partisan elections, etc., the June 24 hearing will be the only one about land use. The Commission will take comments on Fair Share, 197a plans, and other ways that the Charter – effectively the City’s constitution – can make planning in NYC more democratic. The Commission has sole authority on what issues, if any, will make it onto the ballot in November. The Commission’s official website is here: http://www.nyc.gov/html/charter/html/home/home.shtml – you can read the Pratt center’s testimony here: http://prattcenter.net/2010/04/07/pratt-center-calls-inclusive-city-charter-process

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

Jackson Heights residents and Council Member Daniel Dromm (bottom left) marched to Queens Community Board 3 to call for expanding the car-free 78th Street Play Street. Photo via Jackson Heights Green Alliance Nearly 200 Jackson Heights residents marched on their community board last Thursday night to support the expansion of car-free public space in their […]

Since 2009, the Department of Transportation has been engaged in a major study of Jackson Heights’ streets and sidewalks. At the request of community groups and with federal funding from Rep. Joe Crowley, DOT has been developing a plan to make the neighborhood safer, less congested, and more transit-accessible. After two years of research and […]

Sometimes, it’s the little things that make a big difference. Manuel de Dios Unanue Triangle provides a speck of green along Roosevelt Avenue in the packed Jackson Heights neighborhood, but for years, there was nowhere to sit. Even the brick wall surrounding the trees was topped with two spike strips to discourage people from resting for […]

The first 2010 installment of Summer Streets is tomorrow, and I can’t think of a better way to get in the mood than to check in on this inspiring grassroots victory for livable streets in New York City. These are pictures Clarence took last Friday at the 78th Street Play Street in Jackson Heights. The […]

In response to vehicular violence that killed three children in the neighborhood, Jackson Heights residents will demonstrate today for better enforcement and safer streets. At the end of the week, the Pratt Center is hosting a panel discussion about what an equitable agenda for transportation and planning could look like under the de Blasio administration. […]

Jackson Heights’ 78th Street Play Street, a summertime street closure won in last year’s best feel-good story of grassroots activism, has been expanded from two months of car-free space to three this year. If all goes well in September, when the school year has started, some sort of year-round street closure should be in the […]